Lyudmila Bazhenova, MD, Discusses the Reasoning Behind Testing for EGFR Exon 20 Insertions in NSCLC at 2021 WCLC

At the 2021 World Conference on Lung Cancer, CancerNetwork® spoke with Lyudmila Bazhenova, MD, of University of California at San Diego, about methods and objectives of a study that investigated response to immunotherapy in patients with EGFR exon 20 insertion mutant non–small cell lung cancer versus those with wild-type disease.

Transcript:

Patients with EGFR exon 20 insertion [mutations] are the third most prevalent class of EGFR mutant non–small cell lung cancer [and] those patients were excluded from the majority of the clinical trials. With immune checkpoint inhibitors, we really don’t know how those patients perform when given immunotherapy. We also don’t know how many of those patients receive immunotherapy in real life. Therefore, we used our flatiron database spanning the years of 2015 to 2020. The reason why we selected those years was because those were the years where immune checkpoint inhibitors became widely available and used in the community. This [analysis] separated the patients into the EGFR exon 20 insertion [mutant disease] cohort, and a wild-type non–small cell lung cancer cohort, which we defined [with an] EGFR-and ALK-negative test.

Reference

Bazhenova L, Girard N, Minchom A, et al. Comparative Clinical Outcomes Between EGFR Exon20ins and Wildtype NSCLC Treated with Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors. Presented at: 2021 World Conference on Lung Cancer; September 8-14, 2021. Virtual. Abstract P08.04.